“Less is more”: Simplifying point clouds to improve grasping performance

Object grasping is a task that humans do without major concerns. This results from self learning and by observing of other skilled humans doing such task with previous information. However, grasping novel objects in unknown positions for a robot is a complex task which encounters many problems, such as sub-optimal performance rates and the time consumption. In this paper we present a method that complements the state-of-the-art grasping algorithms with two segmentation steps, the first one which removes the largest planar surface in the point cloud of the world before the grasp detector receives them and the second one that complements this segmentation with another segmentation that calculates where the object is located and segments the point cloud by executing a crop around the object. The proposed method significantly improves the grasping success rate (100% improvement over the baseline approach) and simultaneously is able to reduce the time consumption by 23%.